I Fight For The Users wrote:However, I'm very wary of adding visual elements: there are often better ways of improving information design. We did experiment with separating the sidebar with gray borders and background colors, but that ended up drawing too much attention to the sidebar.

What about just a small line that separates the editor's comments from the video information? Right now it just looks like a blanket of white and everything just folds together.

Aside from having gray borders & different background colours is there no other way to divide the contents? Even if it were a thin line with a small gradient/shadowing in either side. Not large but just enough to let the viewer know its separate information..

(giving it more of a realistic 2 column feel)...?

I'd prefer to hold off on adding visual elements for organization's sake until more subsystems that will have a home on a video info page are in place (see e.g. issues 30, 31, and 32). Adding information from those subsystems will change the way the page is organized.

That said, I do think the no-line setup that exists right now is fine. The spacing and page width might be a bit large, and may need to be adjusted -- but I won't know that until more of the page is filled in. I've got a few books (like this one) that use the same layout, and IMO it's very effective.

The application delegates character encodings to its framework (Rails 3.2.6, if you're interested), which seems to do a pretty good job in that regard. Rails defaults to UTF-8 for input and output; the database is CouchDB, which stores stuff as JSON, whose default encoding is UTF-8; and the search index is using Solr, which also defaults to UTF-8.

As you can see from the above example, mixed LTR -> RTL isn't supported. I have no immediate plans to make that work, but if someone wants to give it a shot, I'll look at a patch.

That said, I have imported data from the .org that contains lots of invalid UTF-8 sequences. The .org seems to send HTML as ISO-8859-1, but I'm not sure if that's entirely true -- I tried to fix the invalid sequences by running the downloaded HTML through iconv, and that didn't really help. Still investigating that one.

I'd like a screenshot, along with more platform details. (Windows XP/Vista/7 with ClearType enabled/disabled, etc.)

XP - can't give any more details or a screenshot though, sorry.

This is what TypeKit's telling me:

Is this accurate?

(There's not much I can do about this; I'm just curious. FacitWeb Light renders fine under Safari, Firefox, and Chrome on Windows 7, Ubuntu 12.04, and OS X 10.6+; changing the typeface for what is increasingly becoming an anomaly is IMO not worth it.)